From what I have observed...

From what I have observed, people who read classic literature or have studied philosophy are no less intellectual than a person who never has; sometimes a person is even less intelligent if they are the former than if they are the latter. I only have my own anecdotes to prove this, but I know for certain, regardless of if a person is very liberal, or very conservative, I have seen people who say ridiculously idiotic things that have studied philosophy and read classic literature.

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How are you measuring intellect, and why?

I'm measuring intellect by my own jurisdiction, based on whether or not the things that I've heard other people say add up. Unfortunately, I can't say what those things are because I would rather dispute my own topic than derail it. Why? Because reading and studying philosophy have been a major institution in society for thousands of years, and in spite of what Harold Bloom has said about reading be so important, he himself said that we read because "we can't possibly know enough people". This seems to put reading in the category of other forms of pure art, like paintings and music, which aren't necessarily saying anything which can be understood the same way for every person, but which are open to individual interpretation of his or her own experience.

Education is no guarantee of learning. Anything can be degraded and deformed into mere "technique," in fact it's just human nature to abstract and abstract skills to make them more efficient, more ritualised, more instrumentalised, so that the learner can pick them up by doing the most efficiently parsimonious combination of gestures and with the minimum investment of thought and frustration. Capitalism seizes on this process and kicks it into overdrive, parcelling everything out almost cybernetically so that you can have an entire human society simulating inner humanity without actually experiencing it.

Education was one of the first thing the bourgeoisified. Modern society didn't just industrialise cotton weaving, it industrialised the cultural activities of being smart, looking smart, acting smart. It took aristocratic and clerical thought over from elites who were formerly too atomised, varying, and distant from one another to be pounded down into averages and parcelled out as stock experiences, and it multiplied, diluted, and homogenised them until they could be purchased or doled out by institutions as an Experience.

Our cultural memory still thinks that the real things exist in the simulations, so we think that "someone reading a book" means "someone understanding a book." But these industrialised, dehumanised processes are woven into the process of reading itself, and the infinite and subtle complex of activities surrounding it.

Finding someone who truly understands some philosophical book is an interesting experience. Finding someone who has the correct opinions about that book because he tapped into the false authenticity of the hermeneutic pre-expectations of other people who have already thought the correct opinions and with whose thought he must meld is not interesting.

>Are they new friends of "truth", these coming philosophers? In all probability: for all philosophers have hitherto loved their truths. But certainly they will not be dogmatists. It must offend their pride, and also their taste, if their truth is supposed to be a truth for everyman, which has hitherto been the secret desire and hidden sense of all dogmatic endeavours. "My judgement is my judgement: another cannot easily acquire a right to it" -- such a philosopher of the future may perhaps say. One has to get rid of the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with many. "Good" is no longer good when your neighbour takes it into his mouth. And how could there exist a "common good"! The expression is a self-contradiction: what can be common has ever but little value. In the end it must be as it is and has always been: great things are for the great, abysses for the profound, shudders and delicacies for the refined, and, in sum, all rare things for the rare.

"People have some new thing to chatter about for a while, and then something newer still, and in the meantime go on doing what they have always done."

You can't meassure general intelligence. Reading books allows people to learn new concepts, or get names for them at least. Someone could know of a concept without having read about it.

Saying ridiculously idiotic things is more an indication of immaturity than it is one of intellect.

All the books in the world won't help you if your mind is too green to approach them sensibly.

*lack of intellect, I should have said.

>the correct opinions

Makes your comment look like satire.

Everything "looks like" something to you, which is why you aren't conscious.

>I'm measuring intellect by my own jurisdiction

fuckin lol

this was already covered in plato you dumbass